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DISCLAIMER

While this printer queue might seem to
be some kind of clunky and poorly
construed technology, I assure you that
it is quite advanced on my end and is the
only way I could find of coming to you.
The documents you'll be reading today
have been in transit for nearly a year and
have arrived (I hope) in an order which
the spool process can give to you quickly
and with some clarity. Please forgive any
distortion in the text, it is quite perilous
to communicate this way.

Now I want to make it perfectly clear
that these papers and all my other works
in life belong to the general public. In
fact, I also would like to turn myself over
to all of you as well. This was actually
done several years ago, but in an
embarrassingly disorganized manner. I
like what you've done with the character,
but I'd like to step into his tattered suit
for the next hundred pages and a day.
And after that, I'm yours again. Do what
you must do! I always enjoy seeing what
happens to me.

A Chris, Erik, <(Friendola"} Ed, Nathan.
Toutes les grandes amis que je n'ai jamais pu avoir.

Many, many years ago, so long ago that it's a real
stretch to find anyone else who can remember
this, on the old Oprah show, she did a feature on
individuals who had left society and, in the process, had
eliminated every trace of themselves. She had like three or
four guests up on stage, if I recall correctly, and they had all
gone back and diligently destroyed every little bit of
information previously known about them. Burning birth
certificates and ID cards, canceling bank accounts. Stealing
photos out of family member's albums and destroying them.
They had hired hackers to break into schools and erase their
records. In fact, each of these persons had done such a bang-
up job that all that was known about each of them was their
social security numbers. (Although Oprah's researchers were
unable to say which social belonged to which person; these
numbers were only known because of the noticeable gaps
that were left in the government's records.) On the program,
these people sat in the dark; nameless and unsorted. No one
knew who they were.

Nowadays we would label this kind of act as "information
suicide" or something very sophisticated, because people are
much more aware of the importance of ones' identities, but
in those days we simply called it "jerktoasting" and these
people on the stage were just a few jerktoasters who got
caught. We were fascinated by them, because no one of us
had ever thought of deleting ourselves. It seemed futuristic
to do so and it seemed to exhibit willful antipathy to do so,
which, in a way, somehow seems quite futuristic as well. (We
were all so worried about a dystopian future at the time, a
future of assimilation or a future of surveillance, and these
people had assimilated themselves, lost themselves, in a style
far more effective than the government could dream.)

Of course, Oprah wanted to cut right to the bottom of things
and she straight up asked them, "Why do this? Why do all
this work, this is years and years of work, why do this just to
erase yourselves from society?"

The people in the dark shifted a bit, considering the
question, and, from the movement of their silhouettes, you
could see that they were motioning to each other and
consulting. After a time, a woman in the group spoke and
said, "We don't want to answer that question."

The audience gave a rumble of discontent.

"Okaaay," said Oprah. "But this is kind of a key question
here! Let's get real, I'm not going to just let you out of this
question."

The audience laughed, female laughter. Incidentally, the
videotape of this program can be seen at http://youtube.com
/watch?v=ShpcjWG_Meo. (I don't know if it is proper to
dump a YouTube address here. It feels like I have maybe just
gone ahead and ruined what I am writing by doing that. Has
all of this writing lost its timelessness, to have this relic here?
But maybe this link will never break, maybe it will stay there
for all time. Maybe it's me. I'm a relic which is already out of
his time in the present age. Maybe I am what is holding
things back, maybe I am already not of any relevance. Good
things to consider.)

Allow me to leave the jerktoasters on Oprah's darkened stage
while I drop a name. Any of you happened to read the work
of Dr. Emery Pestus? I can't go on with this story until you've
read him, he's a big name in -nymity. Knows everything
about it. Naturally, he goes on about all the things you know
already: that anonymity obscures the truth, that it opens a
vent for hatred, basically that it turns people into vile and
slanderous beasts. But too often we let disguised persons
slide when it comes to little poems or donations.

On that point of Anonymous donations, he writes:

Where one sees Anonymous etched, one witnesses the spoil of all
the other names etched on the stone beneath it. In many cases,
the gift of each part is the same, but the gift of Anonymous seems
somehow the more virtuous. This lie speaks to the cynicism of
our time! Where is the real man in all of this? Where has he
hidden? We hate the man who is good and who is himself.

Finding myself very impressed by Dr. Pestus' writings,
having dabbled in psuedonymity from time to time, I dashed
him off a letter:

Dr. Pestus, good afternoon.

I am a fellow, a professor of sorts, who is doing work under an
anonymous guise and I have just finished reading your book "Kill
Yourself! The Terrible Things People Say and Do When They
Aren't Themselves." Now, before you start to usher a reply, I am
not writing to disagree with you.

My complaint is that my real name is very plain and I prefer to
have a fictional one. You don't seem to suffer this problem, since
your real name is quite fictional-sounding on its own.

I do realize that having a fictional name makes me a bad person,
but how bad of a person does it make me? Please rate on the
scale of John Q. Public to Mister X.

Also, is it too late to be real?

_why

His reply came in a few days:

Dear Mr. Jonathan Gillette,

Yes, it's true! I know your real name! I asked a few of my experts
to trace back the little e-mail you sent and it lined up with the
coordinates of one Pirate O's General Store in Draper, Utah. It
seems that you composed the e-mail while you were plugged into
their connection, enjoying a Sangria Senorial it seems. A quick
call to store owner Chase McGuinn sorted all of this out. Now

please tell me the point to this ridiculous anonymity exercise,
hmm?

As it turns out, oddly enough, it seems that your real self is just
an unknown programmer from Utah. The myth is that easily
dispelled. Why not make something of your real self? (Of course I
know why and can tell you: Because your fear of the world has
clouded your ability to do things to improve your situation. You
are stuck there in Draper, Utah, until you can cut through the
paranoia!)

Please, Mr. Gillette, come on in. The water's fine. ;)

Best,
Emery Pestus

Now, clearly this letter brought me no end of astonishment.
Pirate O's General Store? Could there really be such a place?
It seemed miraculous that a store by that name could exist!

I raced to open a browser, my first reaction being to look up
Pirate O's and I slammed it into Google, only to be met with
a list of garbage: links to a bar "Pirate Oars" in Cincinnati,
Ohio; lyrics to the song "Pour, Oh Pour the Pirate Sherry";
nothing about such a pirate general store. From there, I
moved on to Googling for "Pirate store draper" and "Chase
McGuinn" and "Sangria Senorial", unable to find anything,
although a search for "McGuinn Senorial" did turn up a
poem entitled "Un espacio senorial donde" by Cezar
McGuinn. (I didn't need to search for Jonathan Gillette,
because I knew who that was.)

I wrote back to Dr. Pestus:

Dearest Doctor,

Thank you for the letter. Sorry to bother you again, but can you
tell me anything else about this place Pirate O's? Just an address
is fine.

_why
And then, well, the e-mail bounced.

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After I deleted everything, I went to lunch with Amanda*
We went to a diner and had coffee* I had an omelette and
1 think: she had a sandwich, I don't think we had coffee,
either, strictly speaking, 1 think we had something else*
I think 1 had grapefruit juice and she had, maybe she had
water*

I do know that she had on a striped hoodie, it was a
short-sleeved hoodie. Purple mostly. I don't recall what
shoes she had on*

"Should we wait until the food comes/1 she said, "before
we talk about The Happening? "or should we just get started?"

Oh, yeah, so we weren't meeting to talk about me deleting
anything, neither of us knew that I was going to be deleting
anything when we set up this lunch, and she had (still has)
no idea, I suspect, that I am even a computer programmer,
we had arranged this the night before and the whole. reason ^r ^
for the lunch was to contemplate our viewing of M* Night > %
Shyamalan's The Happening*

"Should we start?"

"Do you have a lot to e*ay say?" I said*

"Not really/1 she said*

"We can reschedule," I said. "If you need extra time.#

"The trees!" she cried. "It was the trees*:"

"Oh we*re starting with the end then."

"Are we sure we want to talk about this one?"

"J want to," I said. "I liked it."

"You always like the worst things," she said,
have liked it, you were laughing at it the whole time*"

"Well, okay," I said. "Before we talk about the movie—"

"The film—**

"Right, before we get into the film, I feel like we need
to talk about laughing during the movie."

II Uh huh," she said.
"I need to condemn my laughter and the heckling that I was

party to."

"Ohhh," she grabbed her face. HNo! So I'm left as the cynical
hateful heckler." She tipped over until I couldn't see her.

c <r
7

You couldn't

she said* "The people walking

■ e e,
4^P"

y if

- ^

Jy v

She popped up. "Come on^
backwards? "

"I know™"

"The oldllady walking backwards?"

"Yep—"

"Am I supposed to be freaked out that there's an old lady
walking backwards?"

nl don't know* ff

"And the old lady starts to smash her head through all those
windows*" She shook her head. "It's The Happening, though. It's
this scary thing and, you never know, an old lady might start
to walk backwards*"

"Look," I said. "I don't expect you to do anything, I don't
hold you to the rules that I hold myself to. And it's not that
I'm having pity on this poor, poor, well-meaning director just
because the whole world hates him right now."

"So, time has passed and you've changed,"

"That's right."

"You're a better person now," she said. "You're seeing things
clearly now. "

"1 can really say it now, can't I?"

"The trees!" she said* "And she's pregnant. Isn't that awesome?
Life begins*"

"I think that was an homage," I said* ~ 4-^1 *i&l j m;4kf /hv<

"Oh, really?" i^ $A*d *fV1 **t u/&£ **

"Yeah, to films that end with the lady getting pregnant." n&*w*'LL. ■ T«

"I need to stay away from that genre*" fe-ftyovWS; bffav&c, . X

"You didn't like The Sixth Sense, right?" w#$ (le ^^^iin^

*risr

;^o, I thought it was pretty good."

"So you thought it was a quality film, but it just fright- ^0^^%u
ened you." fl&€ Uj

"Yeah, it had some jumpy parts."
1 said, "I didn't like The Sixth Sense, but
Lady in the Water." /,£.

"Don't remember that one," she said. "Bid we watch that one?"

kind of liked /W,^

t jt- « (^ x --.. ~f -. Ki -5 to S' n&

^ :y- 9* -?

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"IS ^

£C

"I think I watched It by myself."

"I remember Signs being good."

"It's fine," I said. "It has a good part where Joaquin
Phoenix is ranting about baby monitors — "

"That does NOT sound familiar."

"Yeah, they hear these kinds of transmissions coming through
the baby monitors, like the aliens are licking their chops and *t^,
really salivating hip; tlmeoon the other end* And then Joaquin p o_
Phoenix Roes off* All this stuff about how ltfs iust a bunch. S, C*
of nerds out there, who don't have girlfriends and so they T ' ^ ^
spend their time messing around with baby monitors." ^ dp *f

My lulce came and I took a. sip, "But you can tell, he's r '%s 4
really scared." ^3 V^

"That sounds great , " she said. f *r~ 2. ~

"who else was in that? . she said. fe3 vli^ A ?

I unfolded my napkin and got the silverware out* "I don't 9^ £%

remember." ^ r %±

She pxot out her *r>hone* v^v ^

"No, don't tro there." < 3

ft T M 7\ "D « TJ

FL D. B." Her fingers*

"Oh, Crist ian Douglas," I said. "It was Grlstian Douglas." %>^

Still typing, head leaned back, under the spell of her phone. 3: cr

"Yeah* Gristian Douglas and Bob Willis." ■' -^t

She aaid nothing* *

"Sheila Mclntyre." 5 V !iL

O c "^

"Yep," she said. *==^> t *

"Bougie Honns." *-£ ^

And then, after a minute of watchinm her lit-up knuckle a. ? ju,

<t~ >» *v'
slide around, past the side of her phone, she said, "Mel y £_

Cribs on. " c 4-

I put my hand over the phone. "Stop." ^f ~, T", E

She looked around my hand. * [^

"And™ and™" ^ 0 ^ '

1 slammed the phone down and h^r hand— I slammed them down *f *

on the counter. .*/*/***/*« «rw ^

■IT

xhone!" she cried. ->wx '->* Y^lh' £***■&) ?t \> ^/fv^s

"Stop it." A^y ?; ^, ^ w/y^ ^p^yt? ^f sch^d

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% 1

"You're no fun."

Me: "You1 re no funl"

Her: "That was really rude*"

Me: "Don't look things up while I'm talking! w

She was wriggling her phone out from under my hand, but 1
held it tight* For a second, 1 was tempted to yank her out from
the booth and twist her arm behind her back, but instead. I just
let go.

She looked closely at her phone, tilting it in the light. She
took the case off to examine it all over.

"Gee whiz," she said, ominously- and quietly. "These things are
expensive* "

"I know/1 I said. "It's an iPhone."

ftSo you donft like iPhones and now you1 re going to take it
out on my iPhone * "

"When are you going to accept that 1 just don't get alon^
with it?" *i

f,Donft make me choose, w she said, in a. pleasantly threatening ' ^

way • _ tT* ^

When the jerktoasters remained silent, Oprah proceeded to ^ ^ §
wear them down, to get them to spill, using all the familiar o fc>

tactics* An appeal to their egos, reminding them that this ^ j * *f' -*.
would be the perfect time to lay out their platfor m. A vow %> i"
of confidence, that no one was at risk, that this was the ?t

° ~ ^

X cp
safe forum that they craved. Finally, she resorted to shame, ^ lo f %
that they would need to so to a commercial, in order to consult '* y* ^

if '■■■■■■■■ r ^.

with her producer how to proceed* cr

But it wasn't a particularly long commercial break* ~+ >

"We're talking to an elusive group,11 she said, "that calls ^ jr

themselves the jerktoasters* " The camera panned the dim characters* *\ \a

"Ken and women, eahh of whom has decided, one their own and ^ o

independently, to erase themselves from society." .^ 3^

The camera returned to Ms. Winfrey* r,^e're back from the ^

<\
break now and wefve decided to turn the stagre lights back on, 5^

to give you at homea peek into who these real h jerktoasters qJ^

really are. Scott—" 7

A man with a headset walked to stage right and flipped the

switch *

The audience gasped.

At first, when I saw this video, I thought this was a bit of
unecessary drama, as if the GASP light had gone off in the
studio audience. But as the camera lowered on to the row of
jerk-toasters, pouring over each of their faces, I could see
that these reople were slumped in their chairs, some of their
heads had fallen back, some had fallen to the side. And right
between the middle two chairs was a machine, a kind of pump,
with fluids in seperate bags, and tubes ran between the machine
and each of these men and women sitting on stage.

The man with the headsat moved rapidly and gracefully from
nerson to person, checking them. He touched the first two. "I
think they're dead," he said, in a Texas drawl. He went right
down the line, the third, the fourth. "Yep, they are." He had
checked them all and now he went to the machine, kneeling to
look at it, and craning keek his neck to see the back of it.
He stood up and turned to Oprah. "It ha# a light sensor on

it . "

The food came.

"Oh good," Amanda said. "Now we can talk about The Happen-

ing; . "

I laughed, but then I said, "Oh, I seriously do still want
to talk about it." And she might have tuned me out at that
point and started cutting her sandwich (yes, that's right J
I remember now, it was an open-faced turkey sandwich J I do
remember it sittign there, because 1 could see the bread, it
was all mashed potatoes underneath and I said, "Where's your
sandwich?" And she said, "This isall of it." And she said,
"There's bread under there." And she lifted it up so I could
see, because I didn't believe her at first.)

"All I think is," I said, "if you take The Happening as
it's presented, and you simply believe what the characters
are telling you, then I agree that it's an awful film. The
trees are stupid and the reople running throufeh the grass
are stupid.

"Then, I started to think, while I was in bed, that maybe the
characters in the film were misled* Maybe it was something else,
something impossible to explain, perhaps a phenomenon in a
dimension that we1 re unaware of, like a kind of unseen presence

that is killing everyone, not ,iust unseen, but completely out of
our abilities to sense it* Something we could neve r ?;uess, never
presume to guess, something science would never point to*

"And, so, reaching futilely for answers, they blame the trees!

"Like the wholemovie, people think thejr are figuring it out*
But they* re not, they1 re not* They* re ,just going insane* And, in
their desperation, in their hopeless effort to make sense of the
world, they blame the trees*11

"I guess, n she said. "If --you want to have your own alternate
plot line*11

"See, this seems much truer to our condition* We think we can
figure these things out, we think we can control things* And nowl
think about the people running through the grass, running away
from the wind — and, shoot, that's just a beautiful image right the
there . "

"You said that like Matthew KcConaugbey. " She smirked at me.

"Who's that?" I said.

"Shyeeoot, that's a beautiful image raht theya.11

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you^re hurt!"

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"What have they
core to you?"

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the episoee here,,,

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i!0r is it just
psychological again?'

"vcu're ar ircrecible
rercenng, kitten/5

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"Wait a minute I
Are people watch rg
js or TV right row?'1

"Psychological tele-
vision? voj can see
people's episooes??'1

5SYour hand is

that of a teenage

wolf*"

T i J %

The next week I went to Dr. Bloodcastle.

He's my dentist and he's my father's dentist and my sister's dentist, too, and I
know one other person who went to him: a girl that I went to school with, but who
died in a car accident with one of her children. And there are only two reasons that I
really ever knew her: the first is because I saw her waiting in Dr. Bloodcastle's office
about ten years ago, I came out one time and my face was puffy; and the second is
because I sat right behind her in Social Studies and one time I idiotically flicked her
bra strap, because it was slightly visible through the back of her t-shirt (and because I
had a friend who rated highly the flicking of bra straps) and she jumped up and said
something like, "Hey." No one noticed, so she just slunk down in her seat.

So I think about her when I go to Dr.
Bloodcastle's. And I also think about her on June 3rd
which was her birthday. Hers is one of the only birthdays
that I remember on the day that it is happening.
Sometimes I see it coming days in advance. I know it's
her birthday because I asked the Social Studies teacher. I
wanted to apologize to the girl, but I didn't have the guts
to tell her right then, so I asked the Social Studies teacher
when her birthday was and, unbelievably, he looked it up
in his book. But I never got the chance to apologize for
flicking her bra strap because we weren't in social studies
together any more when June 3rd rolled around. And, on
top of it, now she's dead.

I asked Dr. Bloodcastle once if he remembered
her and he said she was an amazing person. I asked if she
had any other children, and he said he didn't know,

The 3 Best Parts of the
Mabinogion are:

Firstly, "I will give you a cauldron
with a special property : should a
man of yours be killed today, cast
him into the cauldron, and by
tomorrow he will be good as ever—
but he will be without speech."

Then, "He came here from Ireland
with Cymeidi Cymeinfoll, his wife;
they had escaped from the iron
house in Ireland when it was made
white-hot around them." (By the way,
these two are giants. :P)

The other one is the incident of
Branwn's Slap, which was one of
three unfortunate slaps on that island.

maybe for a minute perhaps I had the idea that maybe I would call the kid some day
and say, "You know— funny story—" and maybe he or she would be glad to hear what
I had to say— but that's the funny thing about our imagination, is that we think people
will always be glad to hear from us. I imagined myself getting serious, winding the
conversation down, and saying, gravely, that I never got to apologize for flicking her
bra strap and then, just letting the kid talk, the poor orphan, just to see what would
transpire. Healing, talk about it.

I didn't bring her up that next week when I went to Dr. Bloodcasde. It seems
creepy to continually bring her up. (This is the first time, in fact, that I've been able
to discuss this at all since many years ago when I first asked the dentist if she had
kids— which is why it's pouring out like this. Although I can say that I have scheduled
quite a lot of my appointments on June 3rd as a thoughtful gesture.)

Dr. Bloodcasde talks softly, but he talks very quickly— so I have to take notes
at the end and I often have to tell him to go back and say it again because I've
missed something. The nice thing about taking notes is that I have a whole journal
full of prescriptive advice from my dentist over the years— I can look back and see
what I was dealing with (orally) when I was fifteen years old. How many people can
say that?

At this point, I think a lot of people might get a kick out of seeing some of
those journal entries— I mean we live in this candid culture, one which aims for
transparency— this sharing is what we do now. But I just can't do it. My dad would
say it's because I'm a "private" person ("I'm private— your brother is very private— my
father was— your grandfather wasn't as much— although he drank in private— generally
all our men are— this is a strong trait in your blood—") but I'm not a private person.
Can anyone that has had a blog be called "private"? (Anyway, where ARE all the
introverts these days? Technology has upgraded introverts into— soft extroverts I
guess.)

I'm not private. Dental information is just insanely mundane. It's boredom
incarnate— measurements, phone numbers, addresses, names.

I don't know. Maybe it's fun to withhold. I do enjoy it. We wouldn't want the
government to withhold— but it seems forgivable for a person to withhold a bit. I
gready appreciate the withholding of mundane information.

Dr. Bloodcasde doesn't have an assistant. I don't know if this is legal, but he
does all the flossing and scraping and all the fussing himself. In a way, it's as if his

hands are the assistants and he is merely supervising. He is very aloof and his hands
are very involved. He face looms large in the great magnifying lens cast over the
proceedings. He holds his head far back, farther than seems sound. The light on his
brow is very strong and he spends quite a bit of time reeling it in or extending it— if s
on a kind of armature. He also has a great deal of other kinds of equipment and
sometimes he is trimming bonsai trees when I enter, which he does with his hands
further inside the foliage than seems sound.

As he worked on my teeth, (and I have told him that I find the dental work
relaxing, so he can take his time and answer the phone if he needs— in fact, once he
left me in the dam to go snip a bonsai tree thing that was bothering him— I looked up
and felt great pleasure that he felt at ease to travel around the room if he wanted—
when I laid back down, I could see how content I was in the overhead mirror) as he
worked on my teeth, I became very melancholy that I wasn't a computer
programmer any longer and I started to tear up even.

You see, I had very flippandy deleted everything. My programs, (my code,)
my blogs, my accounts, my words and stories. And what for? Oh, just because it was
time to move on. Right?

I stared at the overhead mirror.

Boy, this is feeling manipulative. I should write like this. This isn't as
important as all that. Tearing up— what a bunch of heart string manipulation. This is
why I didn't like The Book Thief. What does an Australian guy know about living
under the Nazis? (Gah, I don't want to be cynical. You can't call everything
"cheesy," something has to effect you.)

Dr. Bloodcasde clicked off the light and I was done. He sat me up and said
looks good. I took out my notebook. Wasn't much to write down this time. I asked
him a question about mouthwash. Nothing big.

Then, he goes, "What's happening with the island?"

Hah. Well, okay.

So— since 1998, 1 have operated a private e-mail listserv from a machine called
"georgie" which has lived its life in a number of unfinished basements across the
United States. I know this machine well. It is an old, stalwart Pentium II in a batde-
worn and unmarked grey metal box. Were the machine at hand right now, I think I
could push the button on the 3.5" floppy drive, ejecting a beige disk labelled

"FreeBSD 4.4 Kernel" in permanent marker; however, Id wager that Old Georgie
took something like a FreeBSD 2 into memory on his maiden voyage.

This fine little box has given its life to passing internal communique between
the members of a certain branch of my extended family: The Holyoaks. This is the
rich side of the family. The side with the jetskis. The side of the family that has the
tarmac. The side with the helmet cams. I have seen a garage full of skurfs and
kiteskis and wetboards and other miraculous innovations of sport that no one cares
about any more.

Always weary of the rich, and possibly due in grand measure to my
experiences with this particular bunch, I try to keep out of their business and do
other things that are, well, free. However, from time to time, I can't help but get very
engrossed in the intrigue and drama of the Holyoak dynasty.

For example, the island.

On the listserv, every once in a while the old timers will slip and still call it
Peanut Island. But a few years ago there was a vote and it was changed to Finger
Island and most people on the list actively call it Finger Island.

Home Remedies That
People I Know Are
Enthusiastic About

Snorting cayenne pepper.

Tinctures. ("Parasite-zapping.")

Shining a fluorescent light on
someone in the dark and saying the
problem's name many, many times.

Rolfing.

Spraying cold air from a can.

Putting tongue depressors between
your toes and lying on your stomach.

Medicinal tuning forks.

Duct tape (for insanely dry skin).

Cold showers (for mental illness).

Chuck West, however, makes a point to call
it Peanut Island, he didn't even bother to vote, no
one would have let him anyway, and there are
really a lot of threads on the old mailing list where
Chuck is calling it Peanut Island and everyone else
is calling Finger Island and it goes on like that for
pages and pages without any one direcdy bringing
up the incongruity. He calls it Peanut, they call it
Finger, and this is just one of the many wars over
the island.

I don't want to take a side, so I just say The
Island. Hope that's okay.

The Island has been around in my family
for like seventy years now. It is somewhere in the
Strait of Juan de Fuca, lost in among the spray of
the San Juan Islands, hanging out in the currents of
the upper coast of Washington state. It was bought

by my great-grandfather and his brother, who both worked and made their money in
the aerospace industry. The brother went on to start a chain of gas pumps. See, that's
who Flying J was. This guy, the brother, Jay. He was a recreational pilot and he died
in a plane crash a few years ago. So now Flying J is no longer both a man and a gas
station, he's just a gas station.

From what I've heard, read, and been told, I guess The Island was a very nice
and very secluded family getaway in the 1950s. And my great-grandfather and his
brother probably called it Peanut Island back then. But usually they just said The
Eleventh Estate, since this was the eleventh property they had bought together and
because it was just one in a series of elegant-sounding, exclusive and somewhat
palatial estates, dotting the international map, each with its own set of trampolines
and gardens and horses and probably the trademark garage full of wooden kiteskis.

Now, when my dentist asks about The Island, he's not asking about The
Island or about The Eleventh Estate. Though I suppose there's a certain glamour to
those things, I can see the look of mirth with just a touch of very loving
condescension in Dr. Bloodcastle's eyes. You see, he's asking about Chuck West.

Chuck is Jay's son and he moved on to the island in the seventies. Of course,
The Eleventh Estate was never meant to be anyone's permanent home, although it
was cared for year-round by hired help, various housesitters and locals from the
neighboring islands. But that all changed when Chuck moved in. He was going to
care for the house year after year, as the steward of The Eleventh Estate. A full-time
caretaker, who had wasted away his youthful summers on the island and knew, I
gather, all of its secrets.

I should point out at this time that there were never eleven simultaneous
estates. The peak was when the estate count hit five altogether. So estates came in
and out. But still, why did Chuck choose the Eleventh when there are so many? And
why is it such a point of feuding and debacle?

Because it was the only estate that had its own island. And what could anyone
want more than their own island? Their own city. Their own country, almost. Their
own untouchable sovereignty!

And so, Chuck proceeded to, with great care and devotion, drive that island
into the quagmire. It became not just his home, but the home of every friend and
lover and college buddy that Chuck could collect. You know, not family. Other
people. For a little while, family vacations to The Island continued as normal. It took

some time for The Holyoaks to embrace how unlivable Chuck had made The
Island.

My Aunt Sara especially just hates the guy. "He's just filthy/' she once told
me. We were swimming and she said, "He's just disgusting, just a gross, gross man.
We were there for one day and then I was like, Tve had enough,' and we went and
stayed in Port Angeles."

I try to be honest with these relations, just to see how they take it and I said, "I
kind of like that he just, you know, took over The Island." I waited for a second and
she just shrugged, which wasn't a bad thing for her to do and very understandable
given her age, so I said, "I just think it's remarkable that you have this island, which
is like the crown jewel of The Whole Holyoak Plan for Things and here it is, it's this
guy who somehow is in control of it."

My Aunt Sara shuddered. "See, that just makes me want to kick the guy out of
there. Huh, the crown jewel. You really think it's the crown jewel?"

And I was there when my Uncle Jeff ranted, "I don't know how he's still alive.
When I was last out there, all he had was honey! Honey, man, yeah, just honey! I
looked through the whole house and the only thing I could find was a single little
bear of honey. We had to go over to Friday Harbor."

"Wow, living on honey and locusts," I said and Uncle Jeff laughed like I really
understood, but honestly I really thought fondly of Uncle Chuck eating his honey
and locusts, not in the crazy sense by any stretch. In an admirable, historical sense.
I've always wondered if there was something to that diet. It seems like they go
together; like you would dip locusts into honey and have as a snack. Like ants on a
log.

So, yeah, Chuck was like, "Girl at the store: come check out my island." And,
"Hey, guy at the bus stop: come see my island." (At least, that's how my uncles paint
him.) There is a rumor in the family that he had signs out in Poulsbo, just
permanent marker taped to a stop sign, something about real estate by phone, one-
hundred-thirty grand a year, and a phone number that we all recognized.

So Old Georgie, our faithful little UNIX box, has spent all of his days in the
fight for Peanut, I mean Finger, Island. And you can usually count on him carrying
the load of an e-mail blast for at least one major battle, but sometimes two if we're
lucky, each year, and it almost always comes down in the winter time, when stasis is

disrupted and both sides awake in fury. The Holyoaks over the lost years their
children could have had on The Island. And Chuck, because The Island was his.

"Anything going on with The Island?" asks Dr. Bloodcastle, getting
comfortable in his chair.

"Well, kind of," I say, and then I go into the story, which most recendy has to
do with a terrible winter in which the snow got to the point where it brought some of
the trees down, which did damage to the garage and to the fence that keeps the
horses in. As a result, all the horses got out and ended up swimming to the next
island over. Anyway, I hope to get further into this story if I can find some time, but
I did tell the doctor the whole thing and at the end, he was very satisfied with it and
felt it was one of the best.

"Things just get better and better over on that island," he said. "I love to hear
about. I think it's one of my favorite things I've ever heard."

"Yes," I said. "It's very interesting."

"But you've never been out there?" he said. "I just can't believe it."

"Never have." I crossed my legs. I was still sitting on the dental chair. The
giant magnifying lens was above me. "It's not really my side of the family."

"You said it's your grandfather," he said. "It's just as much yours." He rocked
back and forth in his chair pleasantly. "I'm starting to think you've made all this up,"
he said. "I hope you didn't, but I just can't help it. I can't shake the feeling."

"I guess I don't have any proof," I said, even though it immediately occurred
to me that I could log in to my e-mail from his computer and show him years and
years of messages. But it still seemed wrong. What if there was some detail in there
that would throw him off? I needed to try to stay in control of this. Who knows,
maybe he didn't need me to curate the story for
him. Maybe it would be better if he read it all
himself. Wasn't it true that I well enjoyed my
access to the full history? Detective

My ideal detective is named Winston
"I think you like the story more than I Swanless.

do," I said. "Like I've never wanted to go out He is ffr and he wears Crocs all the

time, even in the snow.

there to the island at all. But you've said you would-"

"Oh, I would/' he said. "Right now, sitting here, I want to go. Like I want to
go now."

I laughed hard at that, and shook my head in disbelief. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, see
that's perfect," I said. "See, but I worry too much that I'd get out there and it'd be
something else. Like what if he was really disgusting like Aunt Sara says. Like if he
was up to things out there, you know?"

"Like what? Like up to stuff--"

"Oh, you know," I said. "Like up to things like up to bestiality or something."

"Oh, sure, sure," he said. "Yeah if he was up to bestiality that'd be pretty bad.
Especially if you found out like if you accidentally walked in or something."

"See," I said, pointing. "Yes, that's exactly what I worry about is that I'd have
to confront the reality of it. So that, if I found out he was up to some bestiality, I
mean that's bad enough, but then what do I do? Do I call the cops? Do I just blow it
off, like, 'Oh, no, no, go right ahead, I get it, I totally get it.' What do you do?"

"Calling the cops seems fine," he said.

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THE PROFESSOR

LEAPS

INTO AN OBSTRUCTION

N JULY 10th, 2010, I threw a pack of cards in my
suitcase. (This was a double deck branded "Regency Playing Cards," a red and a
blue deck of European-sized cards with two stiff, foppishly dressed individuals on
the backs.) I brought two issues of GAMES magazine in a concealed pocket of
the suitcase, which was presumably designed for carrying personal documents.
These I put with the cards in a large plastic bag. I made sure they were two
issues with the cryptograms left undone. I already had some pencils in the
narrow slots inside the secondmost pocket on the front of the pack. (Just Dixon
No. 2s.)

I hadn't made any solid decision to go find the island. But these things are so
impulsive that I don't ever feel that I make a decision at all. Sometimes I do
believe in predestination. I feel helpless to do anything but what I am compelled
to do.

I also threw in a copy of Frances Johnson by Stacey Levine. And also The
Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. I put these in plastic bags.

In retrospect, I can now see that I was unconsciously doing a desert island
selection here. What interests me is that I lunged immediately for two authors

INTO AN OBSTRUCTION

that are contemporary. That isn't what I would have expected. Ifm a little
saddened that Flann O'Brien or Jane Bowles didn't come up at all in that
moment. Or Cervantes, really. I think I would have taken Don Quixote, had I
been packing in the other room instead.

In fact, I think these two books are among the only two contemporary books that I
really enjoy! I mean I like 2666 and I like Hard-Boiled Wonderland, but they don't
quite melt me away like Frances Johnson does. And I definitely don't enjoy
McSweeney's books or Neal Stephenson or, I know this is terrible, David Foster
Wallace. I'm supposed to like these books, but I just don't.

Strangely enough, I have trouble with them because their author's personalities
are so strong, above their characters, something which is a major problem with
what I am writing to you right now! It seems like the only appeal of these words
would be to get inside the mind of its author, is that true for you?

And this is something I struggled with immensely when reading Neil Gaiman. I
stopped reading American Gods, because it was hard to read without feeling that
Gaiman was whispering in all of the characters' ears. With Frances Johnson, I
have such a hard time separating Frances from Stacey Levine, that I can't help
but picture that it is a dressed-up, exaggerated Stacey that is wandering around
Little Munson. Similarly, with Ishiguro, I feel like Ishiguro is the pianist, wandering
around, oblivious to what happens next to him.

These are ridiculous criticisms of any of these books, though. To criticize that a
book's author is present in one way but not the way you like? Even to bring up
these criticisms is more than a bit pathetic, do I want to take up precious time in
this candid biographical scene by complaining about what popular books have
failed to bring me full enjoyment?

THE PROFESSOR LEAPS

Yes, it is pathetic. In a way I feel that's the point of being candid. To expose how
shameful I am. You won't feel bad for me for not enjoying Gaiman. You will just
feel that I am being petty. Thus, you will feel superior to me. If you enjoy Gaiman,
then you will know that you have found enjoyment were I was unable to, and this
is my own fault. And if you dislike Gaiman, then you will feel that you can express
your dislike using a criteria which is more precise and true than mine. I simply do
not like the book because of his authorial whispering. This is an imprecise and
illogical criteria.

In a way, I am criticizing Gaiman so that I will feel superior to Gaiman. I said I
disliked his book, and now I am writing my own thing. I must feel that it is better
than Gaimanfs, yes? Would I purposefully write a book worse than Gaimanfs?
And now you are discovering that I am worse than you, so you are superior to me
in your tastes, and, by extension, you are possibly superior to Gaiman! Simply by
reading, you have discovered this. (That "simply by reading" phrase is perhaps a
subtle dig at you, and was probably a last-ditch effort to regain my superiority. :D)

However, we really do weigh all these things as real measures of quality.
Recently I was arguing with a friend that contemporary literature is very "jokey."
Because a lot of books setup certain scenes so that they can produce a kind of
punchline, maybe even a specific one-liner. My friend was taking me very
seriously, believing that maybe I had a point, maybe contemporary authors,
especially American ones, are influenced by TV to the point that theyVe
incorporated many of the cadences of joke-telling into their novels.

But then, later, I was telling someone else that I loved the old Winnie-the-Pooh
books, especially how Piglet lived under the name of Trespassers W. Which is
short for Trespassers Will (which, in turn, is short for Trespassers William.) And I
said that it was amazing that this joke still felt very fresh and funny after a

INTO AN OBSTRUCTION

hundred years. In fact, I felt that it was one of my favorite parts of the whole
Winnie-the-Pooh series.

At the time, I didn't realize that I was holding very strongly to two ideas that were
completely contradictory. How could I decry the presence of joking in literature
and then turn around and vaunt one single joke from some old novel?

I took the train to Everett, sitting in the crossfire of the many window reflections,
then I walked to the bus stop and bought a ticket to Mt. Vernon. From there, I had
to switch to Skagit Transit, to take some transfers to Anacortes.

I had spent some money on bus tickets. I was at $2400 in my account. And, if I
was careful, I thought this could last me about a year. I usually spent $50 per
week at the grocery store, but I felt I could thin this down to $30. Clothing I
usually picked up second-hand. People will give you clothes. Most people like to
go to a garage sale at the beginning when you can get anything you want, but I
like to go at the end, when the leftovers are being thrown away. Men's apparel is
always last to go anyway.

I usually afforded myself about $100 in spending money, which I usually spent on
stuff like card games, guitar strings, theatre tickets and Mongolian BBQ. In recent
months, though, I had simply been storing this money. I had enough card games
for now and there hadn't been any films that had interested me in a while. Okay,
so I had another $640 in savings.

I needed to pay $150 to the dentist for the cleaning. I would need to buy a water
filtration system (this I purchased for $170 at a sporting outlet store in Anacortes,
I put it in a bunch of plastic bags.) I had taken four buses that day, which cost me
about $12. 1 stopped at the market in Anacortes to get a week's worth of food.
Nothing is worse than having to repurchase all of your spices on extended
vacation, so I had already packed some spices in my suitcase: black lava salt,

THE PROFESSOR LEAPS

cumin and chili powder. I had also brought a small skillet with a white, non-stick,
porcelain coating which I thought I might use over a fire. (However, this never
came up and I ended up throwing out the skillet on Tautbridge Island, although
I'm not planning to specifically go out of my way to mention it in that section.)

Here's what I bought at the store:

1.02 lb of black forest ham at the deli,
sliced at a "1" thickness for sandwiches

. . $4

1.42 lb of havarti, sliced same

. . $6

One baguette

. . $1

One loaf of sunflower seed bread

. . $3

Four plums

. • $1

One clasp-shut plastic tupperware-like container,
listed on the recipt as "POLY BOX" ... $1.39

Two cans, garbanzo beans

$1.09

Two cloves garlic (on sale)
One bread tin
Three cucumbers
Sales tax (8.2%)

$0.79
$3 .99
$1.89
$2.12

Which comes to

$27.90

The plastic container was a last minute idea, something I just saw hanging from
the hooks as I was on my way to the beans. It was a box made of translucent
peach-colored plastic with rounded corners and a tight clasp. This item proved to
be indispensable in keeping my lunch meat and cheese cold. It was just big
enough to house the two bags from the deli and was able to seal tight so that I
could keep it underwater without worry of a leak. Although I quickly ran out of

INTO AN OBSTRUCTION

sliced meat, the little box continued to hold plums, cucumber slices, blackberries
and smoked fish. I used it perpetually. One time I kept two slices of Hawaiian-
topped pizza in it. I don't know if it was absolute necessary to put them in there,
the point is: I used it perpetually!

The bread tin I placed the loaf in, to keep it from getting crushed in my suitcase. I
also used this to great effect throughout my journey. I don't mention this in any of
the forthcoming tales, but during my stay on The Isle of May, I had an
arrangement with a man who I met that I would make bread for him if I could use
his oven, his flour and his yeast to also make bread for myself as well. For him I
made rosemary focaccia and for myself I made white bread. A few times I made
potato bread for myself and a few times I made rosemary focaccia for myself as
well. Once on The Isle of May I made bagels for the man and his friends, since
they had caught quite a lot of salmon in The Sound. The white bread, the potato
bread and the donuts that I make follow the style of my mother, which she taught
me growing up.

The rosemary focaccia and the bagels that I make are my own, though, based on
conversations I had with a friend named Hailey who was a baker and who told
me roughly how to go about making these. From there, I made a slight
innovation, in that I like to heat up a pot of sea water on the stove while I make
the dough. Once the sea water is boiling, I stick it in the cold oven and let it
steam up for a minute. Then I stick the dough in and let it rise with the steaming
sea water. Then I take the bread out, punch it down, and stick it back in to rise
again. I almost always forget about it and let it rise more than I should.

After buying the food, I packed it into my suitcase, which also involved cutting the
baguette into halves and putting them together into a ziploc bag, I boarded the
ferry to Friday Harbor. Twenty minutes later, when Obstruction Island came into
view, I jumped off the side.

■■]•••

i //

"Hello0'1

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I m^i Ai ii^ pokrt. Kl°^ Ak Mi i^e

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"fM*^/ Hon/ Mm A mLi yo

peoi&mrvejL •fBo-\ S*H Ufa Gfk tX*

I came ashore onto what 1 thought would be On --

Island, but which turned out to be something eke entirely,

I walked inland, with water pouring out of my suites
It wa< k-avv, so I clumped it out and stuck all the plastic hoc-
back in. The time was probably around two. 1 had spent epic
a while trying to decide on the water filtration system,

Onlv about a hundred and fifty feet into the xvooc
there 1 bund a vein old gas station. It vaas one of those ;.
stations where the lights were in the sign, but the sign naw
in the sion. 1 went into the bathrooms and changed into |m:v
and a jacket. I put the wet clothes into a plastic hag and s,» •
some time using towels to wipe down the interior ot :.
suitcase.

Then I walked around the gas station, perusing w
shelves. Iks ahva.s interesting what thr} ha.e in these pla,
Bpeeiallv in the wav of hooks and tapes. 1 was glad to see a r, .
of paperbacks, really old ones with the puffy gold letters.

On the rack was a book called SACRED CLOWNS.
The text on the jacket read:

SACRED CLOWNS
AN ANCIENT TRUST IS BROKEN
During a Tano kachina ceremony something
in the antics of the dancing koshare fills the air
with tension. Moments later the clown is
found brutally bludgeoned in the same
manner that a. reservation schoolteacher was
killed just days before

154

hi fnie Navajo style, Officer Jim dice and
Lieutenant teaphorn of the Tribal Police go
back to the beginning to decipher the sacred
clown's message to the people of the Tano
pueblo. Amid guarded tribal secrets and
crooked Indian traders, they find a trail of
blood that links a runaway schoolboy, two
dead bodies, and the mysterious presence of a
sacred artifact.

I must strictly require you that, if you are to continue

reading and go with mc on this sally, that you resist from
looking up anything to do with the book SACRED CLOWNS.
This is paramount. I know the urge must he incredible to 2?>
out with your smartphones and to find out if the book is real
and if this is what the jacket truly read, but ! must INSIST that
von just let it be. I don't know if it's possible for you to exercise
that kind of self-restraint in this modern age, but yon must. Of
all the things J could ask of you, this seenuTso small and simple.
Can you do this for me?

I have good reason for doing this, too. Because I'd like
tor you to experience SACRED CLOWNS as I experienced it.
And my experience went like this: I picked it up. I read the
title. I savored it lor a moment. I turned it around. I read the

jacket copy. I savored that for a moment. And then I placed the
book down again.

f didn't buy it. I couldn't buy it. I felt barred from dointj
anything further. Perhaps this seemed the only wav to keep the
clowns sacred. To me, SACRED CLOWNS was not a book to
be read. Why don't I want you to look it up and to find out if
us real.' Well, quite simply because it CAN'T have been real. 1

1SS

felt an undeniable surge of realization in that moment: that it.
opened the hook that i! would be a solid brick of blank pages

So Let's agree? on this: SACRED CLOWNS is not real

And if von see it in some fellow's library, just say, "Ah
VH'RHKIOWNS Nur rry!,f

And let's say the fellow goes, "Oh, you know that one
Well I forgot it was there,"

Then you must he very grave about this and you. mm
say, "I happen to know that it's a blank book. The book i
entirely blank/'

He illicit <hk "N<n I <'i« sn't think so," and hi* might rea,
for the- book mil vnu must saw "Stop! 1 beg of sou. 'I ho b««
is blank, just leave it! M

Ami \uu must do everything in sour power to stop hi'
from opening that book. Please just promise? me you wi.iL.
don't ask. much, but 1 do ask this.

I ventured through the forest and eame upon a meao*
which led me to another forest at the base of a cliff. I hea<u
north from there, knowing that south was surely all water, an
I ran into a wire fence winding through the forest. 1 cu\ -
around the wire fence and it ended at a row of hlackherr
bushes, which I followed into another meadow.

As 1 ate the blackberries at their conclusion, 1 saw a m
hailing me from across die field. I Je was a lone iblhm , mow
briskly with a tali walking stick, light flashing across his glass*
a.s he trod along. Ik motioned \o me many times, each ue
looked at him he made a friendly wave or a nod of the head, .:
he i'mw closer, I could mv that he had a pipe in his mouth ai
the beihnnirius of a pointed brown beard. Slender white myc
issued from, the corner of .his mouth.

156

know that on«

"1 loT he *aid, as he look his stance before* mo, breathing
considerably, "Never did I expect to meet another adventurer
in all my travels! Where do you call home, friend?1"

J ate blackberries, taking him in, observing his uniform

and varied patches, leather tools carefully inserted into slots in
his belt, "just south of here," I said and waved mv hand north
just for fun. 1 spat on the ground and rubbed it in with my foot.
I said, "So what sort of adventure are you on?"

"Oh, many adventures, "of any and all kinds/' he said,
speaking with great conviction, exhaling deeply and unable to
look at me for long, very much caught in wonder over the great
earth all around us. "Surely yon must see what a wondrous land
this is? Well, of course it is;' He looked around himself
wistfully. He had a pack on with a bed roll under it, *I have
quested here three months now, and it's only just begun. I am
a conservation scientist, a forester and an adveiitiireoiaiu" (He
said, this 'adventuremm' as if he were British;} "My dream is to
never stop learning, to never shy away from a pursuit, to
engage the whole world directly, and that's precisely what Vm
cluing! I left the hubbub of city life, with its distractions ami its
women, and have supplanted myself in this fine, bounteous
land of secrets/ He beamed at me, a brave smile, and his glasses
were bright white,

1 said nothing and he didn't wait for me to reply, he just

♦aid, "This land doesn't give up its secrets easily. In fact, I

•vuuld say they are totally sealed off! But if you find the right

>pot and you give it a little fickle, why it's like an orchid that

o*<ns right up! Don't urn think that\ an apt description?"

"It's not bad," I said.

"Not quite, it's spot on!" he cried. "Don't give me that!
mi you give me that, why \%hvn 1 w^ in the city, thee used

1 57

to call it a worldly pursuit when wed go ehasmg alter the
women, but, iustteok out there and see, the real work y
pursurts axe out here, are they not? We're out p— g tk
lorid here, are we not??* He rattled this of so quickly A ;
sounded entirclv scripted. Then he dusted his hands togetk,
slowlv and looked around meaningfully. "You can chase th
world as Ion, as vou like. You can chase it your whole hf
vou'U never catch up!'' He exclaimed this very gently, •
breath. -It's like the gingerbread nun, i*nt itr He fob •
pipe, holding his ga^against the sky . He let a string of h- ,
fly out the side ^ said, thoughtfully, Nth like the b:
jjinscrbread mart out here, isn't it?"

Don't «et me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed this guy. He|
had a perfom^nce of ^ kind that he was walking tlv
and I took it as my duty to stick to observing.

"So," he said to me, withdrawing his pipe and usir
point down , "what ' s in the suitcase?"
I didn't look at it. "Nothing."
"Sure," he said. "Well, what kind of, what k
explorer are yon then?"

Tm not an explorer ," I said, "Not anything at di . ..
now."

"Not am thing?" he said. That can't he right . You dor. ■
have a trade at all or a craft or some kind? VI) bet you mr

suitcase is full of all your crafts."

I held to a branch of the blackberry hush and shook '
from side to side. "I'm a former freelance professor, but n -
anymore." That came out sadder than I'd have liked.

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"Freelance professor, eh?" ho said, sticking the pipe hack
in. "Interesting yon should say that, since I'm one of those, too.

Exploring, educating folks in all of these parts, Vm sure that
counts, By George, it's true. Look at me! I've got freelance
professor written all over me? fm definitely of that breed. You
should go back to it, it's a fine profession. You know what I
flew here on?" He smacked his knee. "A fiberglass balloon? Ever
heard of them? I flew it from the city! You. should have seen it!"
He laughed, heartily, slamming the pipe loudly against the butt
of his fist, "You would have loved it, mate! I think Til go to the
Sahara next, though I'd like to take a microlight, if you know
what I mean, if I'm headed that way/" He darted his head up,
suspiciously, i4Dusk is coming on. Say, don't look like that, you
just need some confidence, that's all/' He put his hand on my
shoulder. "You need to believe in yourself, try and see yourself
in the light that only you were made to live in. Don't just
wallow in self-pity, that's not what it's all about, is it? Is it?" He
held my shoulder firmly, sometimes shaking it, sometimes
pushing it rhythmically, sometimes taking his hand off to
gesture quickly before slapping it clown on me again, saying, is
it? Is it? It is? It is? It is?*1 He let go of me. ^We freelance
professors ileal to stick together, am I right?** He winked. "Aw.
it's a big world, hut make of it what you. will/*

"So you're really a freelance professor, too?"" I said "I
"r.oiight I made that up/'

"No way," he said. 'I've been a freelance professor for a.
lung time, mate. Remember when I said I was back in the city,
-using girls, you remember.' f was freelance protessorin* as far
>ack as then, actually!"

"Oh , wow , " I said . " Well that * s longer than I have . * This
:<ms probablv unnecessarily sarcastic. There* s no reason, to talk
::ke this. "What's vour name?"

159

tiii

yours?**

me.

"Danny Douglas;' he said, holding his hand out. "What's

We shook, "Why the lucky stiff."

"Eh?" he said, turning his head, but keeping his eyes on

"Why the lucky stiff," I said.

"No, come off," he said, "that's not your name,. What'*
vour real name?"

"Oh, that's not any fun," I said.

"You gotta be who you are, mate. Now what's your
name? Go on, just say it."

"Nah," 1 said. "You don't need it"
"See now I wish had my smartphonc here," he said. "I
bet I could just look that one right up. Yeah, that's annoying, it
ain't right/it really ain't right. You have to be yourself. Who
else you gonna be?

I shruoeed and said, "lbs getting dark. 1 need to god 1
started across the field .

He veiled, "I'm eoing to look it up and I'm going to
come find "von, mate! Heck*; I don't even need to find vol
Onee 1 get my phone hack, lm going to know! 1 basicalK km,
already!"

"Oh, yeah?" 1 veiled, turning around as 1 walked. "Vs.
know it already?"

"Yeah!" he veiled. "1 already know it right now! h
obvious! It's just a name, naate! Doesn't mean anything to hw
it!"

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160

his hand out. ."What's

■•>. \*mr name. What'

u- . Now what's vour

urui as 1 walked. "Y--

'It doesn't mean anything to say it!" I yelled.
"Well then just say itP he yelled.

I didn't need to deal, with any of that, so 1 ran off through
the meadow; A minute later, f heard clomping of feet and
looked behind me and I saw a shadow running up behind me

and I could smell the pipe smoke. He grabbed my arm. and said,
"Hold up now, mate, hold up."

I tried to shake his hand off my arm, but it was on tight,

so I turned back the other way and rail in a very quick circle.
He wouldn't let go! I swung my suitcase around and. clubbed
him.

"Fine, whatever!** he yelled. I slowed down for a

moment, feeling tired, and he bear-hugged rue around the

waist, pinning my arms against my side and lifting me up.

aStop!w I yelled. "Uncle, uncled

"No, no,* he said. Tm not doing a thing until you tell

me what you're up to. Who are you?"

He had his arms around me and his hands were clenched
together, with his pipe held in his hands, I moved my hand up
and grabbed, the pipe and flung it as hard as I could My arms
were pinned, so it was only a few feet, but he let go and yelled,
"Hey! Hey! That's irresponsible!"

f bolted off. J made it easily into the forest and my arm
was tired from the suitcase, so I switched it to the other arm,
nut 1 ran. deep into the forest and sat under a log once I was
awavs in, laying on the ground, and I thought, "How difficult
tins is going to be if there's just a bunch of know-it-all do-
; H>der types out here!*

161

I tried to breathe very quietly, tried to not even breathe
at all, and then went back to thinking, "What a bad spot I've
gotten myself into. Couldn't 1 have just said my name is 'Rex
Reynolds"' and been done with it? What would be the problem
with that? Why didn't I just start going by ' Rex Reynolds* from
the very beginning??"

Well 1 knew that there were reasons I liked "why the
lucky stir, hot I couldn't think of what they were. The name
was a load of nonsense. Maybe that's why 1 liked it. But wasnh
"Rex Reynolds" a load of nonsense? What does "Rex" mean
anyway? 'The name "why" is introspective. It lends itself to
proiiinditv. Rex doesn't!

"Maybe that's better," I thought. '1 don't know. How
do 1 tell which name is better? It's a good thing people done
name themselves or they hi never come to a conclusion. '

I picked up my suitcase again and went on walking
through the forest.

The forest is a region. The night sky is a backdrop. The

section of trees is a room. Tall, imposing trees are in the
section of trees.

Alder is a kind of thing. The trees are alder. Up iron:
this section of trees is the tiny opening in the trees throug.
which 1 could see the stars.

The tinv opening in the trees through which I could se-.
the stars is a room. Cassiopeia is here.

"The mjhbt sky is in the forest. This section of trees is in
the forest. The drainage is in the forest. The drainage is a room
The drainage is west of this section of trees.

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162

* on walking

■hiv.li 1 could see

Dozens of bricks in two parallel lines are here. The angle
of the bricks Is a direction that varies, In the dozens of bricks in

two parallel lines is no water. In the dozens of bricks in two
parallel lines are dry reeds. Some fallen trees, some abandoned
equipment, some discarded cans, and some old PV€ pipe are
scenery in the drainage.

The night skv is a backdrop. It is everywhere.

Perhaps the fallen tree is a door. Perhaps the fallen tree
is west of the drainage and east of an area where I didn't go.
Perhaps the fallen, tree is not openable. An area where I didn't
go is a dark room. My suitcase is a thing and pushabte between

rooms.

The collection of small graves is sooth of the drainage,
The trail is sooth of the collection of small graves, The edge of
the forest is west of the trail

The brambles are north of The trail. Density is a kind of
value. The densities are unencumbered, eas\ to brush aside,
somewhat dense and impenetrable. The brambles has a density.
The brambles are impenetrable. The timber- lined cottage is
south of the edge of the forest, Instead of examining the limber-
lined cottage: move the player to the red shed,

A shed is a kind of room, A shed is usually dark. The red
shed is a shed. A rake is a kind of thing. A rake is in every shed.
Sleep relates a man to one shed,

And, that night, sleep related me to a shed, as I am a
man, and one who slept in the shed,

I thought there might be hay in here, but there wasn't,
just a whole lot of tools, I laid down on. the floor and tried to
steep, It wasn't so cold teallw The door was coining off its

163

hinges and I. thought to myself; sleepily, H should float on that
door , across to the next is 1 and , "

1 weke the- next morning to sounds mining Irom tin
limbi-r-lini-cl cottage. 1 heard suiccs coming from it, in an upper
pitch that pierced right to ni\ oar. It was like a television w«n
on in the card. Maybe someone was washing the car and hac

hrought a'radio outside. 1 got up and brushed ins pants off. :
stood still and listened. It sounded like dead air, like static.

I got itiv suitcase, preparing to leave, figuring f conic
stop In the house to see what was up. I didn't care much If
anyone saw me, they could drive me away, Hut I was gum-
awav regardless. As I walker! nearer and nearer, I eouki tell thai
it was an intercom on the porch through which someone was
breathing and sighing.

"Hello?" I said, looking around the porch at the
decorafhe broom and rocking chair. The intercom continued

with its breathing, which filled the sky with noise and static.

1 pressed the button on the intercom. "Hello?" 1 veiled

up at the house. "Hello?"

The breathimr and sighing continued. 1 walked around
the house ami came hack to the front. The breathing continued
for a moment and then it stopped. I pressed the button again,
"Hello? Can you hear me?"

The voice returned to breathing again. I stopped cari-p
at that point and went to walk away.

1 not halhvax across the lawn and the voice stopped
breathine and said, "I'm bored." it was a woman's some.

I turned around and looked up at the house, Looked at
all the windows, but didn't see anyone.

1.64

Id float on that :

"Hello?* I vcllee

pea caring

ouse. Looked a:

*¥m so bored/' said the woman's voice, adding a very
knowing and superior-sounding laugh to the end. *I just have

nothing to do in here/"

I brought my suitcase back to the porch and set it down .
1 pressed the button. "Sa\ , do vou know where Eleanor Island

is?"

Her voice was loud. "Come inside and Til show you/"
She laughed.

While I admit to being curious, there was something
repulsive about the way she said this.

**I don't want to take your time,** f said, but was cut off
in her veiling through the speaker, "< )hh! But I ha\e nothino to
do! Vm a bored housewife, stuck at home all. alone!" She paused
and then laughed darkly, in a deep tone for a woman, *'You
must be so tired, Mr. Traveler, You should come inside for a
drink," She paused again and then released the button. The
intercom squeaked and 1 thought, uMv she takes a long time to
think about what she's going to say and, strangely, none of it is
very difficult to say/" She continued, *Tm not wearing much,
but I hope that won't bother you. There's no one ever out here,
so 1 never wear very omch/' She paused again. Then simply
-aid. "A bored housewife/'

I pressed the button. "You know, a. bored housewife

o/i a utv appealing thing. 1 don't think fll be coming up."

She replied, uOh? Whv not?*

I pressed the bottom "Well, come on, surely you can
vimk ol something to do in vour spare time. I just don't find
idleness appealing at alb Your mind is wasting away up there."

165

There was a pause, of course. Then her voice returnee
ujmt come up and show me what you mem. "

1 pressed the button. "See, this is the other thing. I mear.
I understand that you probably would like some humar.
contact, lady, but you should be able to understand what 1 nu-.r
without me needing to walk you through it in person/"

"Fine," she said. Tin not bored. 1 was just teasing, IY
very occupied.* She paused. Tin thinking a ti-^an
interesting facts and things. Come up, come up, hurry, I want
to show you/"

I pressed the button, *I have places to be, lady/'

"Oh, realiv?" she said. "Who are you/ Another
conservation scientist out making the rounds, faking advantage
of poor, defenseless housewives?"

I pressed the button, **NoP

YAre you johnny AppleseedY she asked, h< t <^>u
echoing over 'the field. "Out sprinkling your seeds?* The hou>«
shook with hysterical laughter. uOh, Johnny, Juhnny, Johnm /

I. looked hack at the shed,

I pressed the button, Tlun, 1 need to head acro>- o
strait here, I'm going to take the door with me, but I'll be ?m< -
someday,**

"What door?" she answered "You can't take anything!"*
I pressed the button, "The door on the shed, miss/5

I pointed to the shed door and then 1 walked out on m
lawn while I held the arm out. I saw a shadow run to th
window, the outline of an unkempt triangle of curly hair. ! i

166

oiadow <r-r\

frail.

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I pull

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The

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The <4ia'i- -

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shadow spread across the windows before focusing into a. single
frail shape of a woman.

I walked to the door and pulled at it, ft came right off,
save lor a few nails in the hingvs. 1 poll again.

The shadow hanged at the window with both fists,

I polled the door again, and again until it released itself.
The woman hanged in repetition, I looked hack at the house,
'The shadow ran to one end of the house and then the other.
The shadow split and magnified as she moved, I took the? door
down to the bay and floated it out into the sound,

161

THE PROFESSOR VS

THE INHABITANTS OF

FLUTE ISLAND

'aking in a foreign country is never

as disorienting as one would

presume it to be, in large part due

to that familiar texture that is common to

reality, wherever it may be happening. I felt

like Huck Finn setting out, going out on the

sly like this, on my new door, thinking less

about arriving somewhere and more about getting away from somewhere. I

set my suitcase on the door and pushed off. I had dug up a long branch near

the shore and, while it wasn't very straight, it was mighty long.

Good old Huck Finn. I must idolize him. He's stuck somewhere deep. I
could never get my engines going to be a rich guy. I stayed right at freelance
professor.

You see, it was common practice among all of the nerds of the 80s to
see in themselves either a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs. And even all the adults
would go on about this, too, "Hey, are you going to be the next Bill Gates?"
They saw it as the two extremes: Gates, intrepid, brilliant, conniving— a
programmer and a businessman; and, well, on the other side, was Jobs:
handsome, classy, passionate, counterculture even— being friends with that
old hacker-whistler Cap'n Crunch.

These two weren't but two sides of the same coin. The Rich Computer
Guys Of The Late Twentieth-Century Commemorative Coin. They

represented that old rags-to-riches ideal that's so intoxicating to our society.
At the same time, there was a torment I could see that those thrones held.

With Gates, it was that no one really liked his software. Sorry, but at
least among his peers— the other bright minds and innovators— Windows
was a kind of curse that he'd blighted us with. People who liked Windows
didn't really like Windows— they were just demonstrating how pragmatic
and down-to-earth they were.

And in Jobs' case, here's a guy who just couldn't get along with anyone.
When you look at it, who really wanted to be either of these guys? The ego on
these two capitalists was breathtaking! Old Steve Jobs had himself a doozie
of a God complex, coming down from the mount to give us our new set of
tablets before riding back into the sky on a brushed steel chariot of fire.

Nah, I liked Huck Finn. He flew by the seat of his pants. Even after he
and Tom Sawyer struck it rich, his drunk dad was still stealing through the
window to breathe on him. Even with the niceties of the Widow Douglas,
Huck gets an itch and he gets outta therel

It took many hours to reach the next island to the west. Doors just don't
move very fast. And my stick sucked. It was late evening when I arrived. I
hammered my frustrations on the door, but nobody answered. I hauled it
ashore and made a lean-to just inside the forest.

It was actually very nice under the door. It made a nice roof, but not a
nice floor.

I set out again the next morning, collecting blackberries. I ate as many
as I could. I hardly put a dent in the whole crop. And then my eye caught
something through the space in leaves. A stagnant lake sat behind this
corridor of berries, and a hill went up from it, and a number of men were
gathering around a hole halfway up the hill. There were about seven of them,
Frenchmen by the look of it. I only say that because they wore black
turtlenecks and blue jeans and because they looked quite emaciated and

appeared to be old. They had a way of hunching over, but maybe that was
because of the hole, it was awkwardly placed halfway up the hill on an incline.
Then they all came out of the hole and closed it off with a wooden lid.

They wound their way around the hill and I followed them, moving
along the lines of blackberry bushes, which made a concentric circle around
the hill. Once I caught up with them, maybe thirty yards off to their side, they
started to sense me and a few looked at me, I thought I was well concealed,
but they could clearly see me through the bushes, and made no motions to
me, so I continued walking and looking at them, making no sign to them
either. For some reason, it felt that they should say hi to me, you'd think the
burden of introduction would be on the larger group rather than one person,
but I had forgotten that I could play the role of the lost individual, simply
looking for directions, instead I followed along as they walked down the hill.
In a short time, they were all looking at me, walking at my same pace, and
they were hunched over, something simian about this. They had an
inscrutable look in their eyes, like animals. Then they wound around the hill
again and their path went down a dark ravine and they disappeared from
view.

I hurried to follow them. I went down the dark ravine and went into a
cave at the end. The men were gathered inside, standing in a circle with their
heads together. There was little light and no sense of human presence. It was
cold and they stood like stones. One man who had a ripped sleeve turned to
me and said harshly, "Shut the door." He held a metal tube in his hand.

I stepped back. "You want me to shut the door?"

It turned out that I had misheard him because the man with the ripped
sleeve repeated himself and it was in French, "C'est de dore."

I didn't know, still don't, what "de dore" would mean.

I departed the cave and walked on the pathway. I left the ravine and
stood aside. I thought of going back in, maybe that was rude to run away. But

I had the feeling they didn't want me in there. Maybe that was just me being
insecure, I feel like people don't naturally like me. If I was wrong, maybe one
of them would come out and get me. Maybe they did like me, because they
had looked at me for a long time while we were walking.

I thought of those old French street signs that I had seen out on the
coast. Was there an old guard of misplaced Frenchmen living out here,
surviving in this wild? And then a detail of their clothing came to me as I
stood there. New Balance. They had all been wearing identical shoes. I hadn't
seen it in the cave, but as they walked, it was the tips of their shoes that gave
it away, the tips of their shoes went up, like New Balance. And then I thought,
so these weren't Frenchies at all, but some kind of a group or a clan that
followed Steve Jobs, all dressed the same.

I went back into the cave and I stopped short, for it was empty. I walked
slowly inside, but there was nothing there. My eyes adjusted, though, and fell
upon a wooden lid in the middle of the cave wall on the side. I lifted it and
climbed inside the tunnel behind it. I kept my foot in the lid for a moment to
make a light inside, but the tunnel turned off so that I couldn't see where it
went. I let the lid close and climbed on.

In a while, I reached another lid, so I pushed it open. I had come out
on the side of the hill where I had first seen them sniffing around. There was
no one here and it was still gray and murky all around me.

I walked back to my door and laid underneath it. I wondered if I should
have run around the hill one more time, to see if they had gone back to the
cave. But then I thought that, if they wanted to avoid me, they would have
just crawled back into the hole again, and we could have been doing that over
and over for some time. So it was better to just read my book and rest up. I
could try to find them again tomorrow. I got out Frances Johnson and read
about five pages before I fell asleep.

I had a dream that I was taking pictures of a piece of rope. And the rope
was positioning itself in a lot of slinky positions. As I took photographs, I felt

somewhat surprised that a fuss hasn't been made about Frances Johnson at
all. You never hear anyone talking about. Sure I've mentioned it a few times
so far, because it was in my suitcase, but that's not quite enough, I'd say,
because it's probably the greatest book to come out of this century so far.
People will not agree with that, of course, because Frances doesn't tackle any
big issues that we like to think about. But there are a lot of adults acting like
children in Stacey Levine books. Maybe we'll look back and see that adults
acting like children was a major issue that we were dealing with at the turn
of the century. Maybe over-seriousness is a really big issue we're dealing
with. Come to think of it, I don't know what we're dealing with actually,
especially since everyone is dealing with such different things than what I'm
dealing with. For instance, many people struggle with acceptance, feeling like
they aren't accepted by other people. But what I deal with is primarily hatred
of entrepreneurs. But it's something that I'm always working on and I've
gotten much better.

I woke up from under the door and went back out to take a stroll
through the woods. I lived here know and felt it was time to find my place. I
started by heading down to the blackberry bushes to gas up. I felt I would
never tire of them, in fact, I like to eat blackberries because one time I was at
Red Apple Market and they had a giant blackboard out front with the top ten
best fruits that you can eat and the first one was blackberries. I guess they're
the best. I ate a few more and, again, spotted the Frenchmen through that
space in the branches, all gathered around their hole. Holy cow, I had
forgotten about them already!

I ran out, but wanted to come up on them quietly, so I padded softly,
but determinedly, up the hill until I stood by them.

"So what's this old hole about?" I said with my arms crossed.

They looked up at me in surprise, holding their hands up. Again I saw
the one with the ripped sleeve, holding his metal tube, cowering next to the
hole. He gave me a perturbed look. They shook their heads when they saw
that it was me and turned back to the hole. One of the men was flipping up

the lid of the hole and commenting on it, as if to say something was broken
about it, though the hinge seemed sturdy and the wood thick.

Trying to instigate them a little further, I cleared my throat and said,
"So why do all of you look like Steve Jobs?"

They paid no notice to me and I tried saying again, "Steve Jobs, right?
Steve Jobs?" Trying to say it in a French way even, to try and coax some
recognition out of them, but they made no connection and went right on
motioning at the door and flipping its lid up.

I tried a bit of my own French at this point, wondering if that might
catch them. "Qu'est ce que vous fairez... vous fais?" I said, not too sure. But I
was basically trying to say, "What are you guys doing?"

They looked around and one of them hummed a little and said, "C'est
que faites-vous?" Which I didn't understand and which didn't even seem like
correct French to me.

I tried again. "Qu'est ce que... err, how would you say, 'What's going
on?' Uhh... ca va?" I said, which I knew meant, "How's it going."

The man speaking to me stood up. He repeated "ga va" as if he didn't
understand and said something else in French that seemed to mean, "What
are you going?" I asked him if he spake English and he said something like,
"Do you speak French?" but he used the term "Franchais" for "French".

I tried some numbers with him and said, "Un. Deux. Trois." He said,
"Oui. Un. Deux. Trois." I did the next few numbers and he understood those.
Then I said, "Seven." And he didn't know that one. I said "sept" again, maybe
I had pronounced it wrong. He said, "Non." I said, "There are seven men
here." He said, "No, there are eleven (onze) men here." I looked around, to
be sure, but there were only seven. I said, "Seven." And then he flashed his
fingers at me to count them out and I saw that he only had three fingers on
each hand.

What kind of derelicts were these Steve Jobs? I said again, "Steve Jobs?
Savez-vous Steve Jobs?" All he said was, "Que'st ce que? Hein?" I didn't have
anything else to say, so we looked around at everyone else for a little while
and then I shrugged and motioned to him and he did likewise and we sat
down.

I looked around at all of these old guys with great interest. They said
nothing, but seemed to be surveying the hill intently around. Whereas they
had seemed like primates as they loped about earlier, they began to look
positively avian as they squatted on the hill and peered about them. They
were universally thin and grey, with hair in disarray, some were shorter, most
had fascinating crooked noses, maybe this is what had made me think of
birds, and, again, they all wore the black turtleneck and the jeans. They were
certainly disheveled, but the attire had such an air of practicality and
nonchalance that I couldn't help but wonder if maybe Jobs had struck gold
with this, had discovered the universal fashion.

I felt no discomfort or desire to leave, but felt immense curiosity about
this group and was possessed by a desire to blend in. For me, old men are
very appealing, much in the same way that children are very appealing to
many people. Actually, I see very little difference between old men and little
children. Well, no, that's not quite right, I feel a difference, but I feel the same
air from these two groups. Neither group is entangled at all, in the ridiculous
seriousness, in the business and economics, in the urgency of time. However,
if a child or an elderly person IS caught up in these things, it is fantastic to
see, it is hugely comical, especially when done earnestly, how it mocks the
adult world, how satirical it is! (This reminds me of a time when I came upon
a set of brothers who had a drink stand, and it turned out they were selling
Arnold Palmers, in polo shirts no less, but they and the other children were
calling them "Amora Palmers" which sounded fiendishly delicious:
lemonade and iced tea and an aphrodisiac.) And so I find old men to be a
great delight and I think fondly of the times when I would chat on the lawn
with my neighbor many years ago, a German man, and he would tell me
stories of being drafted in the German army, of fighting the Poles up and

down the buildings, of losing his town to the same Poles, of hating the Poles
and leaving everything behind, of the bombing of Dresden. When I think of
it, I feel such a pang of regret that I never recorded it all down and that he is
assuredly lost now and that we never skimmed the surface of what he could
have told me. I think of riding in my grandfather's MG. I think of the times
that I have squeezed an old person's hand and they haven't let go. One time
a woman squeezed my hand and wouldn't let go and she was young but I
despised it. But when an old woman squeezes my hand, I wait to see if she
will let go and I hope she doesn't let go. Now I sat on the hill among these old
men, I had no concept of time, perhaps it was 11, or perhaps it was 3 in the
afternoon. I looked back at the one who had been speaking with me, I had
already begun to mentally call him "Herbert" for some reason, he seemed to
be very aware of me and was uncomfortably darting his eyes back to me, and
even looked at me imploringly, as one who is helpless and impatient.
"Herbert" held his hands like a praying mantis, not tightly though, but at the
sides of his chest, while the others held their arms limply at their sides. Their
skin was filthy.

I ventured away, to eat blackberries again, still keeping an eye on the
flock. I don't know how I had gotten into this habit of eating so frequently. I
was dependent on this nervous habit all of the sudden, or maybe the
blackberries just weren't hitting the spot. I couldn't get enough. I realized
this and I stopped immediately, then meandered slowly up the hill again. I
sat in the midst of the Jobsian derelicts. I watched the man with the ripped
sleeve, he put the metal tube to his mouth and made noises with it from time
to time, it was a piccolo. It seemed to have three holes along the top and one
near the thumb, which he covered with the flap of skin between thumb and
forefinger. He played short, quick songs, all of which seemed very off-key and
absurd, like free jazz sped up. Some of the other men took out piccolos of
their own, though they didn't make any effort to play them, but were content
to flutter their fingers over the holes and only chime in after each song,
saying, "Dune." After a few minutes of this, the man with the ripped sleeve
seemed to enter an extended piccolo tirade, playing for what must have been
twenty minutes, thirty minutes, perhaps more, breaking occasionally to
breathe, but then getting right back to it, hammering out the trills, piping

until I got the giggles, was this how Alzheimer's patients would live in the
wild?? I tried to find a way to enjoy this music, but it was so random and
hermetic, high, flinty, and impossible to predict, it felt anthropologically
valuable, sure, but that's it, I couldn't kick the feeling that it was too primitive
a kind of world music, too low in its evolution, devoid of important nuance
and dynamic. In short, my American disdain was hearing its name called,
and I got annoyed with the laborsome tune. I was past this kind of thing. And
when it really got to me, I closed my eyes to shut it out but only found it closer
there, I was unable to escape the piercing inanity of the piccolo's perpetual
climb and fall until it was done. Again, it was probably thirty or forty minutes
in total, and the other men said, "Dune," which I can translate to you now as,
"Acknowledged." Then the men waited again and, in just moments, the
wooden lid over the hole began to clatter something fierce, as if a terrible
wind was speaking through it. The man with the ripped sleeve turned to the
hole and opened the lid and wind came through the tunnel and hit the man,
shooting his hair back and tossing itself through his clothes with abandon.
Now here's what happened: something spilled out of the hole, at first I
thought it was a large rotisserie chicken, but the wind died down and they
picked the thing up, a man slung the thing over his shoulder, it was a young
boy, naked, holding his eyes shut, with his legs kicking a little, a boy streaked
with dirt stains and rocks in his skin that I had taken to be a rub. They carried
him down the hill and one of these Jobsian derelicts, a man with a pith
helmet on, came running ahead with a folded set of clothes under his arm, a
small black turtleneck and jeans for the boy. They put the kid down and
dressed him, guiding his legs, for he was suffering from exhaustion. The boy
had his arms by his side and I could see he had three fingers. They also put
New Balance on him and then he was put over the shoulder again and
carried. They were leaving, I ran back to my camp, the space under the
propped-up door, and grabbed my suitcase.

When I caught up with them, they were standing in the trailway. The
boy was still being held and the men had pooled together. On the side of the
trail, the man with the ripped sleeve had collapsed and "Herbert" was
stooped down over him with another man. They were holding the hand of the
man with the ripped shirt and listening to his chest. I knelt down by the

collapsed man and looked over him. He was motionless. I said, "II est
fatigue?"

"Herbert" said to me, "C'est mort." ("It is dead.") I put my hand over
my mouth. "Herbert" shrugged.

I checked the man's neck, but felt nothing. Maybe I was doing it wrong.
I checked a few times. "Comment?" I said.

The other man who knelt with us began taking the collapsed man's
pants off. "Herbert" took the piccolo out of the man's pocket and got up. He
offered the piccolo to another man in the group. This man took the piccolo
and shrugged, patting his head and laughing. The group seemed relieved,
many were swinging their arms and laughing.

This disturbed me very much and I walked away from the group.
Where did this boy come from? He seemed impaired. What if he was
crippled? I felt very troubled and watched the group from afar. "Herbert"
walked over to me, humming pleasantly and snapping his fingers. He said,
in French, "It is fine. It returns."

I said, "Non, non. C'est mort. Tu sais."

He said, "No, it is not there. It returns tomorrow morning."

"Tomorrow morning?" I said.

"Oui,"hesaid."Onyva."

He walked on, fanning the entire group ahead with his hands. They
moved on through the woods, the sun beginning to peek out for the first time
in my travels.

I continued to follow them and thought, "I'm not responsible for this
group. In fact, they're much older than me, so they know what they're doing.

Who am I to tell a bunch of old men what to do?" But then I thought of Uncle
Chuck on the island and my conversation with the dentist.

"Well, this isn't bestiality," I said to myself. "This is just a kid who can't
walk and a man who died. These aren't crimes. I should learn to be more
accepting. I've just been on my computer for too long."

The forest was very large. We walked for many hours. We must have
been on part of Eleanor Island. And Eleanor must extend into a much larger
peninsula, because there's no way that it just ends in half of a mile. The day
was very beautiful and we followed a cluster of trees that had been razed in
many parts, so that a trail kept the sky in view and, in some places, a slender
stream interacted with the trail, and we walked over it many times. We
stopped a few times during our journey, once at an hour and a half, another
time at nearly four hours. The men would relieve themselves at these stops
and the boy, too, was taught to relieve himself. This was simpler than
expected. The man with the pith helmet simply pointed at the edges of the
woods, where several other men were urinating. The kid walked over and
stood by the edge of the forest. He stood there for maybe fifteen minutes and
then we could hear the sound of water on leaves. The man with the pith
helmet smiled at me. I couldn't help smiling as well and I gave the man with
the pith helmet a thumbs up. He gave the same sign back to me.

The second time we stopped, they began to play some piccolo music for
the boy. One of the men, a very average-looking man from the group, sat on
the ground and played a short song for the boy. Then he said, in French, "It
is understood." The other men said, "Dune." He played it again and said, "It
is understood." The other men said, again, "Dune." The average-looking man
motioned to the boy. He waited and then he motioned again and then he said,
"Dune." I could tell they wanted the boy to say it, too, so I sat next to the boy
and said, "Dune," then pointed to him. I said it again and pointed to him. The
boy said, "Dune."

The average-looking man played the song again. And then we all said,
"Dune." The next song was all numbers. They went through each note and

each note matched with one of the six numbers. Then he would play through
the song and the numbers would add up. (I don't remember all of the notes,
but number songs always started with C#-F.) We got through the numbers
and said, "Dune." Then they taught a story with a song and it went like this:
The sky was a note and the forest was a note and the ground was a note and
a man was a note. Then he glued these things together using the same
addition he used with numbers. So he had a skyman and a forestman and a
groundman.

His song went on, saying that the skyman was equal to one and the
forestman was equal to two and the groundman was equal to three. I
envisioned costumes for each of these characters. I couldn't decide with the
groundman if he was made of ground or if he had a canvas sack on. I pictured
him coming up from under the ground and taking a drink from the stream.
Then the song said that the difference between the skyman and the
groundman was eighty-six. This puzzled me and I looked at the boy. His eyes
were open and he said, "Dune," when the song ended.

I thought, "This must be an allegory for how the math works here." And
I left it to my subconscious to sort it out.

The hike took us to a valley where another group was camping. It was
a kind of bowl that had been dug up, perhaps by lumberjacks. The night was
growing stormy and the men hid away under boards that were lodged in the
dirt over small, shallow foxholes. The man with the pith helmet took me and
the boy down to a set of boards toward the bottom of the pit. We sat on piles
of telephone books. (I say these were telephone books, but they were more
like magazines, they dated back to the 1980s and were labelled, "Port
Frampton, Washington," they had no telephone numbers, just lists of names
and corresponding ham radio call signs, I looked through quite a number of
these, the names and call signs never seemed to change, from year to year.)

I was distracted from looking at the phone books once I realized that
the boy was playing a piccolo. The man in the pith helmet had given it to him
and was saying, "Dune," and smiling after each little song. I sat there and ate

my cold cuts. The boy went through the numbers and we said, "Dune." He
went through the sky and the forest and the ground again and we said,
"Dune," and he brought us all the way to 86. Then the man in the pith helmet
took back the flute and taught us a few more things, including how to convey
shapes and sizes, whether a person is old or young, sick or dead, and how to
warn someone about an evil presence.

As we did this, "Herbert" came around and stood aside while we
listened. At first I had thought he had come to see the man with the pith
helmet, but when the lesson had ended, "Herbert" tapped my arm and said,
"It is seeing," and he took me outside.

The night was clear and I pointed up. "La lune!" And I looked at him
and he smiled. "La nuit! Avec les etoiles!" But as I looked closer, I could see
in the moonlight all the pores on his skin and his face looked very gaunt. I
stood back in horror and peered at him, he was somehow smaller.

"Herbert," I said (with a silent tee and in a voice of awe), "C'est
vieillesse?" (Which is to say, "Are you old?" in what I approximated his
language to be.)

He said, "64? 65?"

"I don't know," I said. "Yes?"

"Oui," he said. "64. 65."

He took me down to a cave with lights within. I came to know this room
as the "flute box". It was a place where the men came to mold the new
piccolos and it was often crammed with men of all ages. Even the boy came
down to work here the next morning. The men had collected some old flutes
and melted them down, they would go into newer molds, adding holes and
attachments in the process. That night, the recent innovation was a slender
point on the open end of the piccolo. In time I learned that this was used to
spear fish and carve trees and replaced the jagged metal (usually cut from

can lids) that some of the men carried around. They were happily ditching
their old can lids into the fire and finishing a new flute.

I sat against the side of the cave, talking to "Herbert" as well as I could,
marveling to him about the utility of these flutes. I asked him who had
invented the flute. He said that it was a man called "Trepite" who came
through there very often.

"Is he one of you?" I asked.

He said, "Yes, he is a man from here."

"The flute is very clever," I said. "I am starting to understand."

He said, "That is how we know to make flutes."

"How?" I said.

He said, "We play the flute to teach how to make a flute."

I took this to mean that the flute could be used to teach someone else
how to make a flute. I found this quite amazing, that the device could
perpetuate itself in this way.

"Does it teach anything else?" I said.

"Oh, how to walk the area," he said. "And how to raise children."

"Really?" I said. It occurred to me that they could use the flutes to
describe a whole landscape, to transfer a map from one man's mind to
another.

I wondered that I had not seen them eating at all. I asked him what
they did for food.

"We do not eat," he said.

"No," I said. "You must!"

"No," he laughed. "It is not necessary."

In the light, it was clear that he was running very ragged. He looked
very depleted, in comparison to earlier, so much that I could hardly believe
it was the same man. I tried to get him to come back with me to eat some of
the food in my suitcase, but he only laughed. His hands sat at his side like a
praying mantis, though he turned them over as he talked.

The next morning I woke up and the man with the pith helmet and the
boy were gone. I got right out of bed and went outside, where it was overcast,
and some of the men were loitering about, pondering their flutes. I walked
from hovel to hovel, seeing only empty holes. I went further up the pit and
eventually discovered a young guy in his twenties who was wearing the pith
helmet.

I asked him, "Where is the old man?" I pointed to his hat.

He looked all around and then at me again. He was smiling.

I said, "The old man." I pointed at his hat again. "That's the old man's
hat."

The guy said, "Dune," and smiled.

I felt a bit perturbed that he couldn't see that I was a little impatient,
but I stopped myself and tried to settle down. Clearly this guy couldn't
understand me.

I whistled a series, "l. 2. 3."

He said, "Dune."

I whistled, "The old man."

He nodded. "Dune." And then he whistled, "He is dead."

I said, "Dune?" I whistled, "The little boy."

He said, "Dune." He whistled, "I am the little boy." He was certainly
wearing a black turtleneck and jeans and the New Balance, too.

I said, "Dune."

Then I ran down the hill, asking each of the men along the way,
"Where's Herbert? Where's Herbert?" No one could tell me. I went back to
the cave and took out a sheet of paper and a pen out of a plastic bag. I wrote
the date on the top of the paper. I figured it was July 12th, 2010. As I fumbled
to write, I noticed that my hands were shaking very badly. And what's more:
my hands looked dry and wrinkly. I yelled in horror and closed my eyes. I
grabbed my head and sobbed, saying, "There's a disease. They're all sick." I
looked again at my hands, taking a chance on them again, and I saw that they
weren't that bad.

I stopped shaking and walked into the hazy light outside. Were my
hands very old? I couldn't tell. They seemed not too bad. They just seemed
dirty.

I went back and began writing again:

Does this look like old man's handwriting? Test. Test.

It wasn't as terribly shaky as I thought. It was just more slanted than I
usually write.

I went down to the "flute box" looking for Herbert, but he wasn't there.
So I brought my suitcase out of the cave and went walking down the trail that

I had come in on. About two miles along that road, I found another dead
man, very old, who had collapsed on the side of the road.

But then I saw that he was still breathing, so I bent down and held his
hand. He held my hand tightly. It was like holding a socket wrench.

"It's alright," I said.

He whistled to me. "The ground man."

"Just relax," I said.

"The ground man," he whistled. "The ground man." He did this very
faintly and then he stopped moving and I heard no further breaths from him.

I said my dunes.

I walked for a few hours back on the path. It was many hours of
walking, many of hours of mundane trail. It didn't look quite as fascinating
as before. The stream looked smaller, I tried to see it as I had seen it
yesterday. While looking in the stream, I found a red pencil with a green
eraser. Words were embossed on the side of it in gold: THIS IS TIME WELL
SPENT. I put the pencil in my coat pocket.

Eventually I arrived at the clearing where the men had all peed the day
before. I stopped and ate some bread and hummus. Then I urinated, stocked
up on blackberries, and got back on the path.

Just as I was leaving, I saw that a few men were coming toward me.
One of them was "Herbert"! On his shoulders was a young man playing the
piccolo. I couldn't understand the tune, as I was too far away, and anyway, it
seemed somewhat beyond my level. But it was an exceedingly jubilant group,
because they would end each little song with shouts of dune and raised fists.

As they came close, "Herbert" yelled through his cupped hands, "It
returns! It returns!" The happiness upon rejoining with him almost recalls to
mind a sunny day, but it was just another murky sky around us. I caught up
to meet them and straight away I saw "Herbert" to be a very old man now.
For when he took the child off his back, it turned out that he was crouched
over and his arms wouldn't go into the praying mantis position as easily.
They tilted to the sides, the elbow looked beyond frail.

I put my hands on both sides of him, to steady him, "Herbert! Herbert!
Look at you. You're so old. How did you get so old?"

He said, "No, it's fine." He put his hands on my shoulders. "Thank you
for holding me up. It's a heavy boy."

"No," I said, grasping him firmly. "You're dying. You need to eat. You're
all dying of starvation." I set my suitcase on the ground and got out the bread
and hummus again. "Another man died about an hour or two back on the
trail. And the man with the pith helmet died. I'm also wondering if I'm
getting older, too."

I handed him some bread smeared with a giant gob of hummus.

"Is this food?" he said. "That's fine."

"Eat it," I said.

I took a bite off and put it on his tongue and slid it into his mouth. He
chewed at it, mashing it against his teeth with his tongue, then he spit it on
the ground.

"No," I said. "Eat it or you're going to die!"
"That's not very fine," he said. "It is food?"
"Yes!" I cried.

"Put it away," he said. "I am going to die."

"Oh, you are going to die?" I said.

"Yes," he said. "Put it away. I will return just fine."

All this talk of returning really set me off, too. What if he didn't return?
This was incredibly foolish. To live just to die. And to die so easily.

Blast it. What was going on here? These men were aging before my
eyes. These men, these Jobsian derelicts, how could I get them to come
around? I thought to get away from this, but then I thought, "It's only been a
day. And it does feel insanely productive, considering that I've lived through
so much of these men's lives. I can see all of life this way, not just a few
minutes here or there, but years passing all at once." It was terrifying, but it
was hard to tear myself away from.

We trekked back to the camp again and I kept a close eye on my friend,
wondering if he would topple over. He talked much about the flutes as we
walked together, musing over the little innovations he wanted to add. He
talked about a hole he wanted to add. Other men had added holes, but they
had never worked, they had always been in the wrong place. He talked about
a method of hinging them so they could fold in half and he talked about
making flutes out of a paste made of leaves. I asked him what would be the
point of leaf-based flutes and he told me that flutes were scarce, so the metal
supply was diminishing, making the flutes smaller and smaller. In fact, he
had heard that the flutes had once been very large. We arrived at camp and,
after all of this talking, he was very short of breath so I asked him if he was
alright. He said, "yes," and he patted my arm and walked down to the flute
box.

I stowed my suitcase in the cave again and found the young boy there,
now appearing to be in his fifties. I had expected this, and I probably would

have questioned the boy had he not been wearing the pith helmet. He was
playing the flute as another man listened and gave his dunes.

I took out a sheet of paper and wrote:

July 12th, 2010, that evening.
Still young? Am I still young?

I was sure that I was getting older. Sometimes I looked at my hands
and they were okay, but the skin seemed to be sagging. I pulled up my
pantleg. See, it all looked so much older.

I walked down to the flute box to look for Herbert. The room was busy
with activity, but I saw him against the side of the wall, where we had sat the
night before. I stooped down to check him and he was dead. I stood back up
and watched the men intently heating up their cups of hot metal. Slowly
turning them in the flame. I sat down by Herb and took his hand very firmly
and kissed it. Then I went to bed.

That night, my discussion with Amanda came back to me. How
previously I had criticized the kinds of small talk discussions, particularly
discussions about music, because they revolved simply around "Did you like
this? Have you heard of this?" and how they never went anywhere beyond
that, you could never keep track of what you were recommended and there
was never anything to talk about, maybe a scene, maybe a lyric. Those
pointless discussions that had always left me empty, never able to talk about
the beauty of music itself adequately, just the names and the styles.

But now I longed to have this kind of idle discussion. To talk to Amanda
about "The Happening". Maybe there was much more to this kind of talk than
I had thought. Why would anyone want to have a deep, meaningful
discussion all the time?

The little boy died the next afternoon and I took his pith helmet. I
couldn't get myself to wear it so I gave it to a new boy, who asked me, in

French, "Is it yours?" He must have seen that I wasn't wearing it, perhaps
noticed how I was holding it.

I said, "No, it's from a man long ago. You want it?"

He said, "That's fine." So I put it on his head and, from then on, I saw
him walking all over camp, raising dust in his pith helmet. Whenever I saw
him, I laughed and I could hear that my laugh was an old man's.

I felt very feeble, and found myself unable to walk back on the path to
my own camp, to the red door I had ripped off the shed. I thought, "I can't be
that bad. I'm at least not aging as quickly as the others. And I'm eating fine.
Maybe I'm letting all this death and feebleness rub off on me."

I constructed a task for myself, in the form of running from the bottom
of the pit to the top, as fast as I could. But I found that I couldn't run at all,
nor could I make it to my own cave, which was only about thirty feet up the
hill. So I changed the idea: I would try to go from the top of the hill to the
bottom and see how that went. I whistled for someone to carry me to the top
of the hill. As the man was carrying me up, the red pencil fell out of my coat
and began rolling down the hill.

"Wait!" I cried. "Stop!"

He let me down and I spent the rest of the evening working my way
down the pit, searching for the pencil, to no avail.

I sat on the side of the flute box that night, again thinking of the time I
had sat there, talking to Herb. For the next few nights I would always end my
night there, lost in melancholic nostalgia. That particular night, though, my
troubled reverie was interrupted by a flurry of activity among the men, along
with lights in my peripheral vision.

I looked up and a man in khaki shorts with dark hair was inspecting
the flutes with a flashlights and muttering to the men, "None of these look

quite as good..." The man was speaking English. He had glasses and a black
moustache. "I feel like the quality on these is going down," he said in a frank
tone.

"Hello?" I said to him. "You speak English."

"Sure," he said. "Who are you?" He had his hands full of flutes and he
was turning them over, really giving them a thorough look.

"Rex Reynolds," I said, having recently started to think of myself as an
older man and the name seemed to be fitting more and more. "I've been stuck
here for so long," I said. "How do I get out of here?"

"Well," he said, still consumed with the tiny instruments. "You can go
anywhere. Any direction leads away from here."

"But I mean can you give me a ride?" I said.

He gave the flutes back to the men and addressed me directly.

"I'm Paul Allen," he said. "Of Microsoft."

"Hello," I said, feebly.

"I'm a wealthy, powerful man in this region and also in the world.
Beloved by some, hated by others." He adjusted his glasses and then took out
his wallet. "I am eccentric," he said and gave me two one-hundred dollar bills.
"And I spend my money freely and unpredictably, but often on things that
improve life for everyone, in ways that are not immediately obvious, but
which will ultimately benefit us."

"Why did you give me this?" I said, holding out the bill. "I just need a
ride."

"I am usually ten or twenty years ahead of the curve," he said. "Most
people say 'about thirteen' and, I won't lie, that does ring true to me." He had
been motioning with his wallet, but now he put it away. "You are a man who
has learned English despite the pressures of the crowd. Consider this me
investing in you."

A roaring sound was heard from outside, a rushing of wind. Could have
been a helicopter or a large tractor used to crush hay bales. "Yes, you are old.
But maybe this is just what you need to seed your business." He walked
toward the door. "I must go now," he yelled and ran out.

I struggled to stand up, but was unable to, he was gone and the sounds
outside had died away.

Surprisingly, the men around me, these Jobsian derelicts, weren't very
territorial or predatory, not in the least. I often dropped the bills I was
carrying, and I would always hear a man whistle at me from behind, someone
who was returning one of the hundred-dollar bills to me. They cautioned me
gravely, but I didn't follow any of it. I had dropped my flute studies over a
day ago.

Night after night, I sat by the fire, waiting for Herbert to return, until
the fifth night. That night, I felt a strong pain in my side, toward the back,
maybe near my kidneys and I curled against the wall, trying to control it.

"Oh, blast," I said. "Oh my."

I stood up and shook it off and walked around the outside of the flute
box. But I could feel it there. Death was in there, waiting to strike again. I
walked around the box, holding my side, watching the men hack away at their
flutes.

"You idiots!" I yelled at them. "You killed me!"

They looked up at me, but I didn't know any of them. All the men I had
cared about were dead. I didn't know any of these, except the guy who had
carried me, but he wasn't even here.

"You stupid nitwits!" I yelled. "This is bollocks! I shouldn't be dying!
You should be dying! I'm the one eating food!"

Some men came out of their caves and came down into the pit,
presumably to see what the fuss was. I cursed at them all, all these derelicts.

"Stop this flute nonsense!" I cried and I collected myself, trying to
reason with them, still keeping a lid on the pain in my side. "We could have
found a cure. There's a disease out here, all of you. What if there's radiation
out here? What if it's the stupid god-forsaken flutes? What if these piccolos
speed up your brain?" A crowd had gathered around me and, again, they took
the primate form, hanging their arms aside, scratching at their faces. "You
aren't thinking!" I yelled. "I figure that most of you only have two days to live.
Two days MAXIMUM! Do you realize that? You're going to be groundmen in
two days. This is crazy, to be spending all of your time on these blasted..."
Someone had got me by the neck and was trying to haul me off, but I clawed
at them and shook myself away. "No! No! Listen! You need to start looking
around, what could be causing this? Is it the leaves? Is it the trees? What is
it?"

The man who had grabbed me came forward again, with a humorous
look on his face. "I am Slupchik," he said, patting his chest with one of his
club-like hands.

"Now, see. They don't understand you." He pointed around at the
men's faces. "They don't understand you any more than you understand
them."

I said, "I am one of them. Look at me! I understand them completely."
I cried out in pain and fell to the ground. "Gah!" I yelled, in total agony.
"Gahhh!" I was disgraceful, writhing, unable to die.

The man Slupchik picked me up and carried me up to a small hovel.
"Just calm down," he said. "It's no use."

He set me down in the cave, then walked outside. He came back a little
while later with another of the derelicts. He had the derelict sit next to me.

"Now," Slupchik said, very sternly. "I'm going to leave this one here
with you, because I think you need it. But there is no use," he said, even more
critically, "there is no use in trying to judge everything by the condition you
are in right now. You are absolutely delusional if you think that you know
anything right now." He said goodbye and left.

The man sat next to me. I had him pull me up against the wall and we
both slept against the wall. As he slept, I secretly took his hand and held it
tight. As I did so, I felt a slender instrument in his hand, a tiny flute. I felt its
edges, it was not a flute, it was a pencil, a light, hexagonal tube. I felt along
the shaft for the golden words.

"THIS IS," I cried, softly, trembling, unable to take the pencil from him,
but unable to let it go, I cried all the tears that I had and I resolved to say it
with conviction, "THIS IS TIME WELL SPENT," I said and, biting my lip,
tasting my own salt, at that point, I must have died.

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